Evidence Based Practice (NUR 4169): What is EBP?

NUR 4169 Course Description

This course focuses on improving patient outcomes through an evidenced-based nursing practice approach in symptom assessment, intervention, and evaluation.

NUR 4169 is a 3-credit course. The NUR 4169 Library Guide is designed to supplement your course assignments and materials. (It's also a great guide for any FGCU student wanting to know more about EBP in a fun, informative way!)

What is EBP and why is it important?

Evidence Based Practice signifies a systematic, yet holistic and patient-oriented approach to health care. EBP is an offshoot of evidence based medicine (EBM), defined in Sackett’s key article:

"Evidence based medicine is the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external evidence from systematic research."

This definition of EBM requires integration of three major components for medical decision making: 1) the best external evidence, 2) individual practitioner’s clinical expertise, and 3) patients' preference.

Evidence-based Nursing (EBN) goes beyond those three components, adding more extended consideration of patient values, and including access to adequate resources. EBN has been said to incorporate:

the patient’s clinical state, clinical setting and circumstances

the patient’s preferences and actions

the best research evidence, defined as: "methodologically sound, clinically relevant research about the effectiveness and safety of nursing interventions, the accuracy and precision of nursing assessment measures, the power of prognostic markers, the strength of causal relationships, the cost effectiveness of nursing interventions, and the meaning of illness or patient experiences.”

Viva La Evidence

Watch a parody of Coldplay's Viva La Vida: this music video is all about evidence based healthcare, including a little bit about the history of evidence and key principles.

EBP Made Easy: Self-tutorials

Check out these tutorials to go over evidence-based practice at your own pace. They will allow you to skip around or replay the parts you are most interested in seeing. They do a GREAT job of breaking down Evidence-Based Practice in easy-to-understand bites!

The following tutorial was designed specifically for nurses and to promote EBP in nursing care:

Intended for any health care practitioner or student who needs a basic introduction to the principles of Evidence-Based Practice. Teaches you how to define EBP, identify parts of well-built clinical question, identify key critical appraisal issues to determine a study's validity, and gives some search strategies for PubMed. [From Duke University Medical Center Library and the Health Sciences Library at UNC-Chapel Hill.]

Walks you through the steps of EBP, formulating a PICO question, using evidence-based resources, critically appraising info, and re-evaluating the evidence you find for patient benefit. [From University of Minnesota Health Science Libraries.]

Offers a nice intro to EBP, including applying it to a clinical scenario, formulating PICO, appraising & applying evidence, and even a PubMed tutorial! [From University of California at Irving Libraries]

EBP Process in Action

Here's a chart that was created by Mary Kay Hartung, a former FGCU Health Professions & Social Work Librarian. It shows EBP in action to help you implement it for your own studies: